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One of the key elements of any CRM plan is integration, the unification of all your company’s data sources and silo systems to create a single, holistic view of each customer.. Whether they are, business organization or system-based silos, they all conspire to make customer journeys fragmented, painful and costly.

A typical customer journey includes interactions via contact center, corporate portals and conventional emails. Yes every call, every click, every message counts. Enabling these journey points is paramount and Oracle is privileged to assist you in the strategic components to this journey via this webinar.

It is written several times by several people on pathetic performance of Indian Railways online ticket booking site www.irctc.co.in. Still nothing stops me in writing this blog post as I believe there is lot more can be done by Government to make the basic facility of online ticket booking experience better.

IRCTC and Customer (Citizen) Experience

The fundamental issue to the problem is capacity (number of seats available in the trains) not able to meet the demand (millions of reservations). Unless the fundamental issue is solved by effective planning and execution by Indian Railways over long time, the frustration with online reservation portal www.irctc.co.in can never be resolved. But knowing the fact that in long term, we are all dead, what is it government can do in short term to alleviate the citizen’s concerns?

I have penned down few of those things here….

Facilitate offline booking in peak load without forcing people to stand in virtual queue

The site so far to my knowledge is not PCI complaint and this stops the website from storing customer credit card information. Making the site PCI complaint can facilitate customers to store their credit cards to do offline booking without users waiting for response in the virtual queue from payment gateway / booking engine in the web browser. The continues retries only make the situation worse.

All www.irctc.co.in has to do is to facilitate storing the customer ticket booking request (from date, to date, train selection, passenger details etc), do the booking offline with stored Credit Card info and send a confirmation mail after booking. This will improve the Customer Experience of people who are today subjected to hassle during peak loads (Tatkal, Festival Seasons, Vacations etc)

For TATKAL booking too people should be able to schedule an offline booking request and IRCTC can execute this in an efficient manner as per the sequence of registration of these requests in the back-end than spoiling the performance of the whole site and bringing down the UX.

Go for Elastic Cloud using Industry leading Platform As A Service (PaaS) vendors like Amazon

IRCTC should go for elastic cloud similar to one offered by AWS than trying to manage the whole IT infrastructure by itself. Here we are taking about Indian Railways train tickets where the demand is subjected to serious fluctuations due to multiple factors. There is no meaning in investing in hardware for peak load capacity (couple of hours) and pay for it 24 X 7. It makes sense to go with elastic cloud backed-up by vendor like Amazon who can scale to IRCTC’s needs on-demand basis and facilitate Pay-Per use model rather than a CAPEX / OPEX intensive model of maintain all hardware / software infrastructure by themselves.

Hook the web reservation system directly to PRS

Scrap the one more additional layer of database at IRCTC and hook the web-channel directly to PRS (Passenger Reservation System – The backbone of Railways ticket booking). By hooking directly to PRS the unnecessary overheads / bottlenecks on IRCTC can be avoided as the PRS is proven to scale for millions of transactions. I know this means a lot in terms of modifying the existing PRS but that is what Government have to do if you intend to create a true Citizen Experience.

Scrap the monopoly of IRCTC and facilitate vendors like makemytrip / flipkart / Cleartrip etc to invest and hook directly to PRS than going via the intermediary IRCTC. I believe the monopoly is one of the root causes if all these issues and this will put an end to it.

IRCTC, Please focus only on train ticket booking

IRCTC has to keep the focus on one and only in train ticket booking as there is lot more to do. Just be in the business of web booking for train tickets and not to waste their investments and engineering resources in trying to become an ecommerce vendor / web marketing channel. There are 100s of people there does that. Invest your precious resources in train ticket booking only…….

Anyone who has gone through the process of setting up a B2B (Business to Business) Account with a Bank would swear by the poor experience they are met with due to highly inefficient and ineffective client On-boarding process that they are subjected to. Banks these days have to realize this to ensure they make the first best impressions to their clients to avoid losing them to competitors.

Though part of the problem is compounded by ever growing regulatory compliance requirements like Anti Money Laundering, Terrorist Funding, Foreign Tax Account Compliance Act etc that the Banks have to adhere to, they just cover only one side of Poor Client On-Boarding experience.

The primary reason for poor on-boarding experience is attributed to few other reasons too.

Viewing the process of Client on-boarding as a back office operation than as an engaging front office with collaborative back-office framework to seamlessly work with numerous back office groups who play a facilitator role in the on-boarding process

Though putting in place a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is not a magic wand that wipe-out all the issues listed above in one go without fundamental change in the way Organizations operate, an effectively designed / implemented CRM that mitigates the above challenges can be a sure differentiator for Banks to improve not only the customer experience but also the Net Customer Life Cycle Value.

Here I have articulated few suggestions and tips on how a CRM system can help Organizations to effectively improve the client on-boarding process.

On lack of customer centric system…

It is never going to be an easy task to just like that replace your product centric legacy back-end systems in one go into a customer centric system. The next viable best alternative available over here is to put an overarching CRM system that wraps your entire product centric core banking systems and make the CRM as a Centralized front office Application for your Relationship managers, Product Specialists and other Sales / marketing teams. The key design attributes of this CRM to facilitate On-Boarding should be below.

For new customers to be on-boarded, enrich the basic prospect data that you have collected in CRM with rich info that is available by integrating with Trusted Data Service Providers like D&B, Hovers etc. These systems provide very rich info about your clients like Client Organization Structure, Business diversity, Geographic Diversity, Key Client Contacts & their profile, financial data etc. This ensures a lot of info is already built in your system to do your KYC (Know Your Customer) as well as Risk Rating / Assessment in an effective manner by asking minimal info from your customers.

For existing customers, ensure your customer profile details (demographic, relationship, financials etc) spread across multiple internal products centric systems are cleaned and de-duplicated in the new CRM system. This would make it easier to facilitate on-boarding of existing customers to some your new products & services lot easier eliminating duplicity in asking info from customers that you have already with you.

On collaboration…

It is a common phenomenon observed in many Banking Organizations that Customer On-Boarding is considered either as a complete Back End (risk, legal, finance etc) responsibility or in few cases as sold Front end responsibility forgetting the underlying need of effective collaboration of front-end and back-end teams to make it easier for the customers.

The CRM one deploys should have all ways and means to make this collaboration between back-end, front-end teams and customers possible without any compromise on data security. The collaboration could be facilitated by in-built email management solutions in CRM, a self-service portal that is integrated with CRM where customers can log-in and have visibility on his on-boarding process as well as share / submit additional info & documents needed, an internal discussion thread / business social features that can make interaction between back-end and front-end teams lot seamless and easier etc. In reality today many of these happen in an adhoc & in-efficient manual manner making it a time consuming as well as frustrating experience for the end customers.

On KPI Measurements…

None of the above systems and processes would work unless people on the ground are mandated to adhere to stringent KPI (Key Performance Indicator)/ SLA (Service Level Agreement). Assuming there is a commitment at the top to make it possible in having them in place, the CRM should provide support to have in place interactive dashboards and reports to report on these KPIs to identify the bottlenecks in the process and streamline it. The reports / metrics can be as simple as one that provides info on on-boarding throughput, performance of adherence to SLAs by various departments managing the on-boarding process, overall lead time, ageing analysis to identify critical bottlenecks etc. The KPIs should serve as a key input to your performance management team to see continuous improvement over a period of time.

So in net, going back to my original point, would like to share that Customer On-Boarding is an important process in establishing a new relationship with your client and making it effective / efficient with a well designed CRM system can make a big difference to Banks as well to Customer Experience.

The excitement that I had when I used the Big Basket service first time, couple of months ago is all vanished now and hence this Blog …When I first came to know about Big Basket through one of my colleagues I am excited as well as sceptical about the whole business of ordering grocery over web in Indian Context. Nevertheless I decided to give a try to see how good their service is. When I made my first purchase in Big Basket site, being a person in IT space, I am pleasantly surprised by many of these interesting features that made a positive impact on customer experience.

A well performing website without any delay / latency in accessing any of the pages

Quicker search results with a real time list shown right at the bottom of the search box

A facility to do a quick add of the listed items to the shopping cart

Convenience of getting it delivered in one of the 4/5 available time slots

And more important acceptance of food vouchers / payment on delivery option

In net all it took is not more than 5 minutes to build my shopping list and place an order against going to the nearby convenience store to purchase these groceries ….

The above is all on my positive experience in placing an order and on I am equally delighted by the prompt delivery at the opted time slots, well mannered service personal, neatly packed groceries delivered without damages, acceptance to take back defective items and payment on delivery option

Now you may wonder whether there is a typo in the title of the blog article . Shouldn’t it be “Why I started using Big Basket” instead of “Why I stopped using Big Basket?” Not at all, the title is perfectly fine and would let you know why

First and foremost all the excitement of ordering groceries over web got vanished after my third order. I don’t know why but it just happened. I am not sure what Big Basket can do all about to solve this. May be to some extent they could have mitigated it by engaging with me in an interactive manner continuously. They know a lot about me. My profile information is there, my frequent shopping items are known, locality is shared and may be lot more info in my interactions with the website. But I hardly received any communication. Probably an engaging dialogue with me as a customer on basis of the above information via newsletters, emails, feedbacks and so on sharing some meaningful content / offers / activities etc could have retained my excitement in using the service. A company which does a fantastic job on that front is Club Mahindra ….

The next biggest issue is out of 10 items I intend to purchase in the website I miss at least 3. I am sure that I am not looking for anything crazy. It is as common as fresh fish of my choice, fruits / vegetable of my choice etc. The issue with this is ultimately I don’t have any other option than going to the nearby shop to buy these missing items which doesn’t make the whole experience interesting. It takes out the excitement of ordering everything from web….Also if I have to do that why I have to order via web and wait for one day to get delivered. I can very much go and get everything that I require immediately from the nearby store.

So I see the depth of product catalogue is not quiet comprehensive and it will definitely puts you off from using the service. Interestingly before you place the order there is also a box which asks for information on whether are there any items that you are unable to order. Unfortunately though I have shared things that I miss regularly, I don’t see them made available in my next interaction after few days. In addition to it I am not sure whether they have technology to monitor the search results that doesn’t retrieve any items, track commonly used search phrases, track people don’t add any items to the cart after performing a search etc to actively expand their product portfolio to understand and keep in stock items the customers are looking for.

The other issue I felt was, though they made significant first step in proving multiple slots in a day to deliver the order, I don’t find an option to get my orders placed in the evening get delivered the next day morning time slot. Most of the times at the best I can get that delivered only on the next day evening. This doesn’t help me in ordering some of the quick grocery replenishments that I am looking for my next day’s use. I am sure this requires over night operations as well an expanded delivery capacity in the morning slot but ultimately that is what required to make some of the customers like me see a value in this service

Finally, I am sure there is benefit in cutting down their cost by not having any physical store but I never see the benefits in-turn passed on to the customers. Most of the times the offers in the site are not useful and they are never personalized to me as customer. I know any e-commerce website has to reach the scale to balance out the cost of customer acquisition against the life time value they get derived from customers but to achieve it they have to ensure they make some compelling offers available in the store on some of the commonly purchased items by customers but unfortunately I don’t find any of their offers / discounted products interesting.

Similarly the minimal order size of Rs 1000 to delivery it without shipping charges is annoying. I can understand they can’t completely do away with it but they should bring it down to as low as Rs 250 as many doesn’t prefer to order the vegetables / fish / meat etc. in bulk and refrigerate it for the week’s use.

On the whole though as a customer I really appreciate many factors like a well performing website, superb logistics, good quality of goods delivered and excellent customer service, on a long run to make me as a loyal customer, I believe they have to implement some of the above compelling suggestions …

I am sure this holds good for other e-retailers too and many are not even up to the mark of Big Basket. Good luck Big Basket …

RightNow CX integration for Twitter is an extension to Oracle RightNow Social Experience capabilities and enables the RightNow platform to instantly generate and distribute pre scripted response to queries / feedbacks posted by customers and consumers via Twitter.

Oracle RightNow Social Experience is part of the market – leading Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service, which offers an integrated approach to customer experience. Oracle RightNow Social Experience enables brands to harness consumer influence and passion in service of the brand. From social media monitoring to branded online communities to a full-service Facebook experience, it is designed to extend experience to the places where consumers are learning, sharing, and buying across the social web. The RightNow CX makes it easy for agents to monitor and engage in relevant customer conversations as they emerge on Twitter, YouTube, RSS-enabled sites, Facebook fan pages, and your own community.

The CRM++ RightNow integration for Twitter includes a batch program to accumulate, scan and read tweets posted by consumers and customers for relevant keywords, compare and map it with RightNow knowledge base data, generate and distribute an appropriate response to the queries / feedbacks. The tweet response, includes, a solution URL that customer can navigate to, and re-tweet or reply for more information.

Tweets that fail to find an appropriate mapping or response within the RightNow Knowledge are tweeted back with a tweets a reference to a web form that can create an incident. Service agents can prioritize on responding to these incidents based on their SLA’s.

The Twitter integration for RightNow CX helps make it easy for agents to monitor, minimize their manual response and engage in relevant customer conversations as they emerge on Twitter. The solution helps build a thriving peer-to-peer support community empowering customers to help themselves, each other, and your organization.

The integrated solution helps companies to manage and maximize the customer experience through potential Twitter touch points. By aligning customer data from Twitter sources through RightNow CX, companies can assure that agents have the most accurate, up-to-date information to streamline the customer interaction process and improve the overall experience and results.

Customer experience is a set of perception; a customer has with a company throughout the buying and owning interactions. Positive Customer Experience (CX)s enable businesses to attract more, retain more, sell more, sell for more, and do more.

CRM++ Email Workbench now leverages the extensibility of Oracle® Fusion CRM framework for delivering effective customer service in addition to its existing integration capability with Oracle® CRM On Demand

CRM++ Email Workbench provides a comprehensive solution to manage, capture, collate, respond and distribute important customer email activity all within the CRM system. Every update, development and opportunity is immediately shared with appropriate team members, without having to manually update or append any new information. One of the key features of the new CRM++ Email Workbench is the ability to link prospect and customers emails with your CRM data so you have better information about your interactions with customers. The seamless automation of service requests and one-stop email communication aids better visibility and accessibility to all customer information and emails within the system.

Customer experience is a set of perception, a customer has with a company throughout the buying and owning interactions. Positive Customer Experience (CX)s enable businesses to attract more, retain more, sell more, sell for more, and do more.

CRMIT Solutions, an Oracle® Platinum Partner with specialization in CRM On Demand & Fusion CRM announced this new release as a part of its continued efforts to add service management features to Oracle® Fusion CRM. The Service Management solution includes the CRM++ Self Service Portal, Computer Telephony Integration and the Email Workbench that compliment and bridge in as service side features for Oracle® Fusion CRM.

CRM++ Email Workbench provides customer centric organizations to link prospect and customers emails with the CRM data for a 360° view of customer interactions. The Email Workbench also eliminates the switching between email programs and CRM modules, which always has been a challenge.

While CX isn’t just about technology, enabling great Customer Experience (CX)s at scale does require a wide range of software solutions and Oracle® is one of the only Customer Experience (CX) vendor that can claim it has every capability mentioned within a comprehensive Customer Experience (CX) portfolio offering, including Oracle® CRM On Demand and Oracle® Fusion CRM. The CRM++ Email Workbench 2.0 integration support for these offerings showcases our focus and commitment to extend the Customer Experience (CX) expertise to our existing and potential customers

CRMIT is meeting the Customer Experience (CX) challenge continuously, by offering to our customers the knowledge, resources, and tools to identify their unique Customer Experience (CX) challenges and by helping to develop strategies to address those pain points. The CRM++ suite of products which include Self Service Portal, Computer Telephony Integration,Email WorkBench and Social CRM++ are some of initiatives in this area

With new Fusion CRM in place, Oracle is still continuously innovating and improvising its existing Oracle CRM On Demand product as well and has rolled out many new features in its respective releases like R19, R20 and R21.

Each release demonstrates the Oracle’s commitment to ongoing innovation that introduces industry-leading capabilities to drive revenue, reduce costs, and improve the customer experience. The features introduced in these new releases are aimed to solve industry-specific pain points, while providing enhanced business value for the life sciences, insurance, financial services and automotive industries.

To know more about the features pertaining to each of the releases, click the following links: